In a tent (later a shack) not far south of our ranch house, in post oak scrub near the West Fork of the Trinity River, lived a woman who had (reportedly) been traded for a whole winter’s catch of skunk hides, the exchange occurring when she was about 13. The man who had her (by what right I don’t know) stopped to spend the night in the camp of a skunk trapper, who immediately took a fancy to the girl — such a fancy, indeed, that he offered his winter’s catch for her. The traveler took the hides and left the girl, who lived to bear the trapper many children; she stayed down near West Fork for the rest of her life. When, as an old woman, she would occasionally need to go to town for some reason, she simply walked out to the nearest dirt road and stood, in silence, until some passer-by picked her up and took her where she was going. This passer-by was often my father, though sometimes it was the school bus I rode in. I rode to town with the old woman — once worth more than fifty skunk hides — many times but I never heard her speak a single word. She was through with talk, one thing she had in common with Louisa Francis McMurtry, my paternal grandmother, who was also through with talk, at least conditionally. Now and then I heard my grandmother talking to my father — her favorite of 12 children — but although she lived with us until her death (when I was 8), I cannot recall her ever addressing a single syllable to me. Her silence had a quality of implacability which I have never forgotten — it made me want to go live in the barn. But Louisa Francis had raised 12 children on a stark frontier, with a husband who was at times erratic (that is, drunk); by the time I came along her interest in children was understandably slight — and that’s putting it mildly. Older cousins remember her as lively; I just remember her as scary. Whatever stories she and the old skunk woman had were not of the sort to be shared with little boys.

My paternal grandfather, William Jefferson McMurtry, an American Scot with a fine mustache and an inquisitive mind, liked to whittle his own toothpicks. He favored cedarwood, both for its whittling qualities and for its sweet smell, but in a pinch, he would take out his pocketknife and whittle a toothpick from any wood available — a plank on the outhouse even, if he happened to be standing near it. (When I was 3 a great white snow owl flew out of that outhouse, right in my face, a thing so frightening that I have never fully recovered from the scare.) The decline of whittling, which is the slow paring away of a stick, usually for no purpose other than to occupy the hands, has clearly deprived storytellers of many willing listeners — most of the old men who filled the spit-and-whittle benches outside the rural courthouses of my youth regaled themselves as they whittled with story after story, the residue, in most cases, of their own somewhat splotchy memories or the memories of their kin.

My grandparents were — potent word — pioneers. They came to an unsettled place, a prairie emptiness, a place where no past was — no Anglo-Saxon past, at least, and not even much Native American past. Comanches, Kiowas, Kickapoos, and other tribal nomads had passed over and no doubt occasionally camped on the low hill where my grandparents stopped their wagon and made their home place; the nomads, like my grandparents, probably stopped there because a fine seeping spring assured them of plentiful water. But the Comanches and the Kiowas were only passing through, on their way to raid the ever more populous settlements to the southeast. They were a brilliantly militant people — the burn they left on the psyches of the first Texas settlers had only now faded out. The more placid Kickapoos were never very numerous and did not impress themselves much either on the land or on history.

If I repeat the fact of an initial emptiness, and emphasize it throughout this essay, it is because it is so important to my own effort at self-understanding. I spent every day of my young life with William Jefferson and Louisa Francis McMurtry and, consequently, am one of the few writers who can still claim to have had prolonged and intimate contact with first-generation American pioneers, men and women who came to a nearly absolute emptiness and began the filling of it themselves, setting 12 children afoot on the prairie grass, a covey of McMurtrys who soon scattered like quail in the direction of the even emptier Panhandle.

The sense that resides in me most clearly when I think back on the 12 McMurtrys (all dead now) is of the intensity and depth of their hunger for land: American land, surveyed legal acreage that would relieve them of nomadism (and of the disenfranchisement of peasant Europe) and let everybody know that they were not shiftless people. (They came, like many other Scotch-Irish settlers in that region, from Missouri, against which there seemed to linger some slight prejudice; Missouri was thought to be lawless, a breeding ground for outlaws.) To the generation my grandparents belonged to, cut loose by the Civil War, all notions of permanence and respectability were inextricably woven into the dream of land tenure, or acreage that would always be holdable by themselves and their children. And yet the McMurtry boys who left the old folks and went to the Panhandle to seek — and get — land of their own were soon overtaken by irony and paradox. They got land, lots of it, yet what they had been before they had land — cowboys — beckoned them all their lives. It was the cowboy, a seminomadic figure who often owned nothing but a saddle, that gave rise to all the stories, all the songs, and many of the movies, when movies came. These aging ranchers, some of whose wild children were already well along in the process of losing the land they had worked so hard to acquire, had, at the end, as consolation for much loss and wastage, the knowledge that they had all, at least, been cowboys in their youth, men who had known the land when it was empty, a place of unpeopled horizons.

One of the things I have been doing, in 20 novels, is filling that same emptiness, peopling it, trying to imagine what the word “frontier” meant to my grandparents (as opposed, say, to what it meant to Frederick Jackson Turner, already a coat-and-tie professor at the University of Wisconsin while my grandparents were building their first cabin and begetting yet more McMurtry quail on that hill in Archer County).

Ironically — not to forget Walter Benjamin — in the very year of his birth (1892), a colony of German immigrants became neighbors of my grandparents in Archer County. A 75,000-acre patch of prairie had somehow been secured by Bismarck’s liberal foe Ludwig Windthorst; by 1895 some 75 German families had settled in an area only about seven miles from where my grandparents built their first cabin. The Germans worked hard, prospered, and are still there. For years I thought “Windthorst” meant something like “wind thrust ” (it is a notably windy county), until I happened on a biography of Ludwig Windthorst, read it, and was enlightened. When young I merely accepted the fact that my father or my grandfather rode over horseback a couple of times a week, to get our mail at Mr. Weinzapfel’s store.

Walter Benjamin, a man famously erudite (though not scholarly), was attempting to write about the storyteller in a broad context, as a figure in world — as opposed to European — history; and yet his description of the way good stories are told and passed on presupposes a certain human and cultural density. There must be people gathered in a place — ideally, perhaps, in an artisan’s shop — to listen to the storyteller and to repeat the story in their turn.

What could he have made of my grandparents’ situation, as it was when they had just arrived at the edge of nowhere? And (funnier question) what would my grandfather have made of the marathon that had been scheduled to be run down the road that passed our house, 100 years (or almost) after he and my grandmother arrived? Though several of his children signally failed to learn to do anything but work, William Jefferson was no workaholic; he preferred shade to sunlight and, once in the shade, liked to ruminate, speculate, question, converse. The spectacle of a bunch of fools in shorts attempting to flounder along for 26 miles in the heat would no doubt have provoked some pungent ruminations.

Archer County was not completely unpopulated when my grandparents arrived, but if Walter Benjamin had happened to be in the wagon with them the day they stopped and unloaded by the fine seeping spring, I expect he would have found the locale to be a context of no context, not immediately propitious for storytelling. My grandfather loved to talk but, due to the absence of near neighbors, had mainly his wife and children to talk to. Louisa Francis, at least from my few observations, had little interest in his spoutings, and the journeymen, tinkers, mendicants, artisans that Benjamin thought made up a good audience for storytelling were at first a long trot down the road.

But they were there, William Jefferson and Louisa Francis, settled on a piece of land that didn’t easily yield a living. The Comanches were no longer a threat, though only a few years earlier they had attacked and killed a little party of teamsters scarcely 15 miles from where the first cabin stood. What my grandparents had to contend with was the sky and the sun, forces sufficient to drive many a pioneer family back to gentler climes.

When I came along, about a half century later, there were still only a few people to be seen, but life had nonetheless accumulated, in all its puzzling but pregnant detail. The covey of McMurtrys, all glamorous birds to me, had — except for my father — long since flown away. And yet, by then, there was a cook, a cowboy or two, my grandparents, occasional visitors (a fencing crew, a vet, a cattle buyer, a surveyor, an oil speculator), who, taken in the aggregate, comprised the beginnings of a sort of culture. In the evening, once the chores were done, people sat on the front porch (if it was summer) or around the fireplace (in the winter) and told stories.

None of these stories were ever told to or directed at me; none of the Slovenly Peter, this-is-a-warning-little-boy stories ever came my way. But I was allowed to listen to whatever stories the adults were telling one another. At that time radio had not come, and when it did come it was at first too staticky to be worth listening to. Except for the occasional square dance, no one had any entertainment except the exchanging of experience that occurs in storytelling. So it was, no doubt, in rural places throughout the centuries; then, there was no media — now, it seems, there’s no life.

My question to Walter Benjamin would be, what kind of stories arise in a place where nothing has ever happened except, of course, the vagaries and vicissitudes of individual life? It was these vagaries and vicissitudes, individual in texture yet common to humanity, that usually got discussed on the porch after supper, a dribble of family history usually involving accidents, injuries, bad choices, good choices, mistakes made with horses, misjudgments of neighbors, and the like. None of this was as interesting to me as the mystery of the old skunk woman, the silent, heavy figure I had come to dread seeing on the road almost as much as I dreaded seeing another hitchhiker whom my father invariably picked up, in this case an unfortunate man — I think he too lived in a hovel, somewhere in the brush — afflicted with St. Vitus’ dance. He gibbered loudly all the way to town but I could not understand a word of his gibbering.

The loud, broken-toothed man with St. Vitus’ dance scared me, but it was the old skunk woman who haunted my dreams. There was a judgment in her silence that I could not fathom; but it was a terrible judgment, I felt, and I wondered often if I was included in it. Everybody — by which I mean our six or eight more or less near neighbors, “near” meaning within 20 miles— knew that she had been acquired for a bunch of polecat pelts. What, I wondered, had made her silent? From my young perspective she was not so much Mother Courage as Mother Hell.

Texas Classics is a summerlong series of excerpts from winners of the Lon Tinkle Award, given by the Texas Institute of Letters for a distinguished career in letters associated with Texas. The series is being edited by former TIL president W.K. “Kip” Stratton and is a joint project of The Dallas Morning News,the TIL (a nonprofit organization whose purpose is to stimulate interest in Texas letters and to recognize distinctive literary achievement) and the University of North Texas’ Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Conference.

About this excerpt

Larry McMurtry is the author of more than 30 novels, including Terms of Endearment and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Lonesome Dove. His newest novel is The Last Kind Words Saloon. He won the Texas Institute of Letters’ Lon Tinkle Award in 1984.

The following is taken from Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections at Sixty and Beyond. Benjamin was an early 20th-century German critic and philosopher whose essay “The Storyteller” in part examines the decline of oral narrative in contemporary times, stories of the sort one might hear told at the Dairy Queen in Archer City, McMurtry’s hometown. In this excerpt, McMurtry recounts stories about his family and about the country that formed them.